What are the spaces that have historically led to unusual rates of creativity and innovation?
“Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent. Build a tangled bank.”
Notes
Adjacent Possible - idea generator/inventor must use ideas/components that already exist
Theory of biologist Stuart Kauffman
What could be based on what currently is
Helps explain multiple discoveries at the same time
Liquid networks - Large cities and the Internet make it possible for loose, informal networks to form, and these enable discoveries
Coffee houses and Parisian salons fit here?
Where information freely flows between many minds
“Cities and markets recruit more minds into the collective project of exploring the adjacent possible.”
Kevin Dunbar research on where important ideas happened, it wasn't in the lab by themselves
Spillover
Slow Hunch - ideas don't come out of nowhere, they build over time
Not just time, but accumulation of tangential ideas?
Ideas often come from the collision of smaller hunches
Time to incubate
Commonplace Book - “Part of the secret of hunch cultivation is simple: write everything down.”
add
Serendipity
Error
Exaptation - the repurposing of one idea/invention/adaptation for another use
Platforms
complex constructions which bring other increasingly complex innovations within the realm of the adjacent possible
Other/To Organize
Chance favors the connected mind
Bricolage
Johnson's chart of major ideas emerging during the 19th and 20th centuries
Questions/Comments
This book is more about collective creativity than what happens in an individual mind. What books would compliment it for that part of the story? Shelley Carson's Your Creative Brain?
Does/do intellectual property, trade secrets, proprietary technology, top-secret R&D labs inhibit creativity/innovation more than they encourage it?
Table of Contents
Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation
by Steven JohnsonWhere Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation
Overview
What are the spaces that have historically led to unusual rates of creativity and innovation?
“Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent. Build a tangled bank.”
Notes
Questions/Comments
Resources